Building the universal integration layer for modern products and raising a Series A from GV with Romain Sestier & Guillaume Lebedel, Co-Founders @ StackOne

Hello and welcome to another episode of writing Unicorns. We're delighted to be joined by Roma and GM from Stack 1. Hey guys, great to have you on. We know each other already, so this is hopefully going to be a fun episode to record. And it would be great if you guys could just start with an introduction to Stack 1 and yourselves, the roles that you hold at the business. Yeah, thanks for having us. So I can get started on Roman Co-founder and CEO of Stack 1 in a nutshell. Stack 1 is a middleware provider for B2B SaaS and AI agent builders. We provide integrations. We help essentially these builders to add integrations to their products, add scale through our unified connectors. I hope you talk more about it, but companies grown very quickly over the last two years and we're recording this podcast literally the day after we just announced our series a fundraise from GV and Workday Ventures. And so yeah, that's us. Oh, that's a lot to give. Thank you for having me, having us. I'm Gion, Co-founder and CEO of Stack 1, so I take care of the product and the tech team and a bunch of solution engineering, etc. where Roman does his magic on go to market and a really level pretend being a good salesperson, although I'd like to think of myself. But not truly commercially minded. Yeah, that's nice. And it's great to have both of you on and obviously we've been working together for the last 18 months or so since we'd have so one that the seed round. And it was, I mean, I saw that Henrik posted on LinkedIn saying the sort of one cool closed type thing and I sort of thought about saying that as well, but he beat me to it. So, but it was so nice to case, you know, it's only a few times a year that you kind of made your investment decision after such a short amount of time, but it was the case with with you and demystifying the rationale for people choosing their co founder would be really interesting because a lot of a lot of our listeners are maybe thinking about starting a business or have just started a business or maybe one day. What should co founders look for in each other? I think it's made it work between you two. I mean, I know you have history, etc. So maybe we can go into that. Yeah, I mean, I think this is a, this is such an important question. And to be honest, a lot, I speak to a lot of founders or aspiring founders and this is always the number one thing I tell them to focus on before the product, before the space, before anything else you want to find someone to do this with or at least if you're going to pick a founder, you need to pick a good one. I guess for the context for the listeners, Giam and I have known each other for over 10 years now we met at one of the first companies that we worked at called Maximizer, which ended up being acquired by Oracle. And since then we've worked together at three different companies. We co founded another business called a parri-i. And then we worked at another company called Yordify, which was ultimately acquired by publicists. And the reason, I guess, I'll start then, Giam, obviously, I'll let you talk through your criteria or how you think through this. But I always say about Stack1 that Giam, I picked Giam as the co founder before we picked this business idea basically because this was way more important to me. And when I was still considering going back into doing my own thing, I tried the way C. CoFundra matching, which is fantastic by the way, I highly recommend it. But the problem I always faced was I don't have any history with these people. I don't know how they're going to react under pressure. I don't know how we're going to work together as we scale through the different motions of the business. Whereas with Giam, we'd work together building our own thing from 0 to 1. We'd gone through difficult times doing this. I had experienced him as much as he said in his intro. He doesn't think of himself as a salesperson. He's actually one of the most commercially minded technical people that I know. And I experienced that in our first business working together. And then he was also, I really appreciated him as an engineering leader at Yordify. So I saw like three completely different versions of the arms through these experiences. And to be honest, I've never met someone. I mean, this is maybe awkward because you're right on the call. But I've genuinely like never met someone like that before. I'm like, I'll put you there. So for me, this is why it's important because you really want to like, it's a gut feel thing at the end of the day, right? And it's you have to feel comfortable with that person. Giam, I can talk for like a whole day about lots of different topics. I feel really comfortable about that. But I also totally trust him to execute flawlessly on different aspects. So that's kind of that was my rationale. That was why, you know, I was like, hey, you don't do something together again. Like that's, you know, let's let's go back into it. I think you don't like it. Yeah, I mean, I like how we demystified by singing just meet more than 10 years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Creators for start of that fails. You know, have a lot of it. In the end, it's like that share the story means that. And I remember I think I wrote a little bit in post about this, which is just a base layer of trust where starting a business, not having to worry like are we aligned? Can we walk with each other? In the long term, always knowing that someone has your back. It's way more important than the idea itself and the idea could have turned it actually we went through, you know, many ideas before we started stuck one. It was more about like, hey, we want to work together. Let's do it on a cool idea. And the most potentially, I'd say the biggest idea we can find as well. That was all about working together. And it's the same for me where it was either was continuing on my path after the acquisition of of Yeldify, I was making a startup with Roma. I wasn't doing a start up by myself. I'm a start up with someone else like this just from out to do it with. Especially because I knew he could execute like no one else and be motivated like no one else. And I think this idea of like, thriving for perfection and we've all experienced being at business where you often have people, you know, you're just doing the work good enough. And both of us have always been like, this is not I can't see myself just doing good enough. It has to be more, more or always more. And I know Roma was totally aligned in that regard. And I never wanted to be the CEO either. I don't want to be the most public facing person. And I like still coding even if I will take that job to make as well. So I just think it was a perfect mix of overall app of skill set because Roma is also very product and text focused. It's a little non-fac but you actually did all the front end for our first startup, which is on the fly. And at the same time I do I can recruit and I can as much as I talk about it. I can say certainly stuck one to people. It's my first requirement. So yeah, I mean, I don't know if you demystify it, but at the end of the day I think it's almost better to do a business with a friend than it is to do with like the most knowledgeable person about a specific topic, especially in the land of SaaS where you can learn. And it's never been easier to learn topics for the LLM's or whatever the product that you want than today. So do it with someone that you want to be stuck down in the trenches because it is a trenches sometimes. It is not a happy time. It has to be you against the world and that's more important than I think in your little criteria. Yeah. I mean, the majority of unicorns were founded by people who didn't work in the space previously. So definitely sage advice. I wonder if you guys have the advantage of knowing each other for 10 years like if you didn't, like what would have been the questions you'd have asked each other. Yeah, to be honest, I think I literally had this conversation the other day with someone who is in the similar situation. They don't have the luxury of having someone that they can go to and kind of pick. And also there was a huge timing element with you that I guess worked out. We didn't talk about. But my recommendation there is actually not about questions or like it's not it's not an interview you can do. I think it's you have to do something. And I sort of recommended can you can do consulting for like six months. And try and work with a bunch of different companies trying to work alongside people who are more technical if you're not a technical person that was the case for that founder. And can you just pick the best person that you work with, you know, like you're going to be inside these companies through your consulting gig. You're going to get to know a space which can give you business ideas as well. Something that the other co founder might know about because they're working in that company already. And therefore like potentially, you know, you're trying to artificially create serendipity. I guess is what I'm trying to say. And I think consulting is a good way to do this. I don't know if this is the only way. But that's my that would be I don't don't think any interview question. Honestly, could do as much as just doing something together like a project. Yeah, I agree. I think actually creating a small side project together and maybe do an open source thing maybe do whatever it may be just to learn to work together. You're not working on your future, you know, billion dollar idea. But you're working to learn together and to see if there's just a vibe. And you know, we talk about vibe recruiting but a certain thing in terms of founder. It's definitely very much even more vibe. It's also like the wrong term. What do you want? Like in terms of questions like what do you actually want to do in your life? Do you want to build a big business? Some people would rather build like a small profitable business and bootstrap that right. And actually even those type of questions are important. Like the idea of like do you have like absolute blockers about raising venture capital because that changes to the type of business you'd be able to build right. Is it a block out to be able to manage people? You can't have a co-founder that won't want to manage people right. And I think there are some certain level based question about like is the personality even feeding the person zero but the true co-founder of a certain type of company on top of like just work together time projects travel together. I think it's a great one and see remember when we went to a four-fell starter. I think it was. Yeah. And we share like a dungeon like water room or something like that. And like those great memories as well. And those are also like also on those tests. Whether it's because you work at companies on customers on consultancy and those tests are traveling and things like that. I think it's a great way also to find new vibe. I think that's a great. The working together is a great step too. you. But it's. a big commitment in some ways, whereas I think that you can just go travel and explore maybe meet a couple of customers in a space that you're interested in as the two of you. If you don't know that person well beforehand, I think that is a great way to get to know someone. Do they energize you or do they drain you, all of those good things? I want to move on slightly to the company building side. This is a bit of a tough question because it's very much a continuing building, a startup and then a scale up. But was there any moment other, have there been any moments that have kind of fundamentally changed what you think it means to build a venture scale startup? I think certainly, I mean, I don't know if it goes to the the sentiment you're thinking about here, I'll tell you the question. But once you raise money, it's like you always have an extra day off pressure, a pressure not because sure you took money, that's not yours and you want to give return on investment, but it's about like, oh, we took money to make this big idea happen. We have to make it happen and you still have more pressure to also have to think about not running out of money, but not using the money as a responsibility as well. And you automatically go into another level of like, how do I sensibly spend the most amount of money to make that big idea happen? Which is like, from the series, it's another level of pressure compared to seed. But compared to when we started, it's very, very different. It's like that every time you're like, I need to make this a billion. Because once that's what we started out to do, but also because now everyone agreed with the vision, I should be able to, everyone gave me the mean to executive. There is no excuse that to executive almost at this point. And I think that's another level of pressure that only comes with venture capitalized business that you have to know about before starting a business. And luckily, as we mentioned before, we agreed on that type of business we wanted to build. And we like to think we kind of anticipated it's going to be, but you need to think about that for sure before you do it. I think that's really interesting because so you guys just raised $20 from GV and work day and others. But is it a good idea to think about the value of $20 million or is it better to keep it in the abstract and to sort of think about them as playing chips? The way we think about it is you have kind of two aspects. One is the size of the opportunity and then how many shots do you have? Basically, that's kind of how I'm thinking about the funding rounds in general, right? Like the size of the opportunity should be proportional to how much you're raising. Like if you're raising too much on an opportunity that's actually very small, you need to be honest with yourself because at the end of the day you're the only one as the founders who are going to have to fit the bill for this. That you want to raise appropriately to the size of the opportunity. So if you're aligned with the investors that the opportunity is massive, I think that's an ombre now. I think the amount that you're raising is ultimately how many shots do you want to take because the moment you raise the more iterations you can have on good market motions, on hiring, on time, on that runways ultimately one of the most precious things you have. But you don't want so long that the opportunity has passed. There's also a big momentum thing. So you want to stay focused on the. I think the way fundraising rounds our structure makes sense. You're kind of looking at a two to three year timeline of how much can you pack in that time in terms of growth that you can get for the company. That's how I think about it. Yeah, I was just. I thought, yeah, I might be adding something. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I mean, obviously we often start with the question around how did you come up with the idea? But it's really clear that you guys were very thoughtful about working together and then the type of business that you wanted to launch. I think that's such important advice because every business is different and every business has different requirements and different outcome potential and things like that. So really, really stellar advice. What does having 20 million come in do for you? I mean, yeah, what are some of those reps that you're all going to now take that are going to help you grow and be that business with that, hopefully, that big outcome? I think for us, specifically, there's some stuff that's going to be generally applicable in my opinion and some stuff, maybe more specific to stack one. I think for us, we are an infrastructure product at the end of the day and we've bought infrastructure products before, especially Yugi, but you want to make sure that you can trust that company is going to be around for a while, right? And that they know what they're doing and you it just gives a lot of credibility. I think obviously, like it's the same product that we had a month ago, but now with the added credibility and backing, I think just gives validation of that vision, validation that the execution is there and that this is something you can trust. So I think that's a really important part of the sales process and for people who are considering bootstrap companies, besides the whole pressure versus no pressure control versus no control, it's an undeniable fact that there is credibility that comes with that level of fundraising, especially when it comes with strategic investments as well from companies like Workday. It just gives you a level of credibility. I think the second thing in my opinion is hiring. I mean, I joined Yodify because they were backed by GV and Softbank. I was like, "Wow, this is amazing." And this is such a good company. Again, you can attract really good talent and I think it's a signal that this company can bet on. So really, again, for me, it's a lot about the credibility from an external perspective and then for us internally, we see it as those, as you refer to them, those chips that we can play and we just need to be smart about how we play them, basically. On that, on that side, I think for us, we can make bigger moves faster and ultimately. And we also do think startup plan is all about our agency. The opportunities are not going to be there forever if they're really good, right? And capital allows you to take them like first. And essentially, that's all we have to do now is like, I think we have a great product, great ideas. Let's take the opportunity where they are and that's a lot of go-to-market bugs and now we can do it. But also, let's keep building the product and building the feature that customers want faster than anyone else. That's what Kepidol allows us to do today. And in term of rake-reading, I think it's also more about the stage of the business, but now it allows us to think a lot more long term about like, okay, we don't have to think about the next six months in a year to prove like just a minimum amount of traction, right? It's like, what does it look like in two years and three years? What should the org chart look like as well? And that means we can like wear wear more strategic ills than we could when we only were thinking like six months to three months ahead. I think there's another aspect, right? You were asking Hector, like what were the key moments that helped us to realize what it means to build a venture scale company. For me, it wasn't actually while I was building a venture scale company that I had this realization. It was when I was working at Google and I joined Google as a product manager. I worked under one of, honestly, one of the best bosses I've ever worked with. She's actually one of our biggest St. John investors now and she was a product leader. I reported to her and I started working on some projects. And one of the key feedbacks I got at the beginning was your dreaming too small. And this is kind of like a crazy thing. Like, you know, I speak to a lot of founders who say they want to build venture back companies or venture scale companies, but you sort of realize that they don't have the mindset yet to get there. And it's something you have to practice is like, whatever you're thinking of right now, you could be thinking bigger. And you're not thinking about world domination yet. You're not thinking about, you know, and it's a muscle you have to kind of train. And ultimately, I don't think I would it. So the outcome of that when I was at Google was I built a project that a product that ended up generating $1 billion in incremental revenue for Google per year. That was literally in 18 months what I built. And honestly, I credit that to the fact that I had her mentorship and coaching throughout this entire experience. And that's why I was really excited to have her on board at Stack One as an investor because I actually do turn to her. It's kind of these, these people who have a brain that just thinks completely outside the box. And it that's what you need. That's what you need to practice because if you don't think like that, your investors are not going to think like that. Your employees are not going to think like that. Your customers are never going to materialize that way either. So you have to be at the inception of that. That's really for me what that means. I've been so impressed with how you guys have iterated on the vision and stayed really nimble as founders and not wedded to any particular sort of endpoint, but also creating organization which seems nimble underneath just the founders. I wonder how you build an organization like that. How you stay nimble. How you stay close to customers and get in particularly on the on the product side and technical side. And the product has evolved quite a lot. The product vision has evolved a lot. So how do you keep a company aligned around that inspired and on the right track? Keeping the team. So essentially the culture and having people that that joined Stack One because they want to build something big together, especially initially less so about the idea because you know, pre-seed or at seed stage, you could pivot, right? And you don't want to hire people that we now stay with you throughout people. And I think we've done a great job hiring people that join because sure they believed in the mission and the vision and the product, but they believed in us and they believed in building a big company. And they were a great culture fit of like I'll do whatever it takes to build a big company with this people. And I think that really the number one criteria when you recruit on any level, any role. And I would definitely credit that where we've had multiple people joining because they wanted to work with us and they believe, you know, ability of building a big company. And that is some of the best people we can have in the long term. I don't know how that necessarily scales, but it's certainly some of the criteria we look for when we hire today as well. Yeah. And I think another important point is recruiting people with low ego. Like you don't want people who will come in and expect to have a team around them immediately. And, you know, who want to stay at a strategic level, whatever that means, you know, like, you need doers, you need people who will actually execute, actually build the campaigns, actually build the software, like code things, but also talk to the clients. And so you need kind of like multi-faceted, well-rounded people who don't have an ego but can execute really well. It's super hard to hire at these early stages, but the only way you can convince someone, you know, so good to join is if you kind of sell them on like your way of executing on like a very good vision. Have you got any tips or tricks that you use to help filter those people, you know, what are you doing to try and eat that out during the process? Actually, I think for me, early on not having the money, I'm not having it as much money, really helped, because that are joining for finance or even fame at that point, you know, and they're joining for trust and believing that they want to do a starter, like that ultimate filter is the fact that if they want it, you know, big tech salaries that go to a big tech, we're offering big tech comp, we're offering vision, and we're offering the starter journey and being there from scratch. And if they say yes to that, at the sacrifice of everything else, that's a great filter in the first place. And in terms of ego, I mean, with early on we used to spend an hour and a half to two hours both from one eye and as like the last step of the recruitment process, trying to understand the person, because all we talked about earlier around founder and actually is kind of what you're trying to condense into a new interview process when you're a crusher early highers, because that we love so much impact. Even if they might not be old in the leadership or management, eventually they have such a enormous impact early on that you're just trying to capture it in two hours, three hours, four hours, how long your process might be. And that's going to understand the person, turners on the characteristics. And I think overall we also want to leverage our network. Like I think that's been a big big advantage for us, like the majority of people in recruitment, where people we knew people we had worked with. And that's almost like when you start a starter, that's a that's a great advantage. And even when we were with now, actually that's what we look for in potentially leadership is people that can bring on their team and we'd be able to leverage same loyalty and I guess, I applied from people that want to work with them. That's for so what we look for nowadays for more senior roles. And in addition, I would say even with the best intentions, you're going to hire the wrong people. The most important advice I've heard. And I would say if I hadn't learned to let go of people like prior to this company, it would have been a very tough lesson to learn in this company. I think it's just like fire fire very quickly. You have to get in the best way possible. Like you ultimately, that person's not going to be successful in that role. And that's not a good thing for them either. And that's not not a good thing for the company. And you want to be very clear about what the expectations are and when it's not working out, having very clear feedback to those people. And it is difficult. But at the end of the day, you have to do it. And one of our investors, Sammy, the founder of Huffy, I remember very early on in our journey. We spoke to him and we asked him, you know, what's one of the regress that you had? I always remember his answer. I give him a nice book about it a lot afterwards. But it's always about like focusing on talent density in the company over time. Because that's the easiest thing to let go of as you're hiring very quickly. And if you don't stay very, very focused on keeping as dense talent in your company as possible, you're going to ultimately lose control. And that just trickles down that the country is hard to fix if you don't act on it quickly. Definitely something that you haven't, if you haven't done it before, if you haven't had to fire, lay off people, whatever else. It's one of those daunting things. Maybe when you start a business that will block you. And almost everything like is incentivized, you not to let go of people early on because you have to admit a mistake. Right. And that's like, as an early stage founder, you're like, oh, shit, like one of the most important thing is recruiting. And I made a mistake. Right. Second, you have all the recruiters and HR or whatever that, you know, that try to convince you none of the right person, right. And third is, it's just super hard. You think it's going to be so hard on the team. Right. But at the end of the day, actually a team of high performer, we always would rather you as a leader making that decision. And if you're not able to do it, obviously long term that will team the company, but even shorter people will it would be a detriment to the whole team. And I think this is something that especially in European culture, I think it's not as, you know, like, common. So when you start a business and you do a startup, you have a lot of negative bias around like separating from people early if it's not a good fit. And that's one of the part that I think because of our expense, we were able to rise through. It's never easy, but it's 100% right that you're going to make mistakes. You should be able to find it quickly for the mutual benefit of the person and the company and yourself. But at the same time, it's sort of a success. It sucks, but I think, you know, the sooner that you as a founder can tell yourself that it is for mutual benefit, the better because it normally is. And you have to sort of trust in the universe and these things, like it's going to be painful for them, potentially in the short term. But if it helps them refocus the mind on something that's more relevant for them in future, then that's, you know, actually a win for them. Really interesting insight around sort of scaling the organization. Want to move on a little bit to the commercial side and just understand a little bit more about how you guys went about getting your first few customers, you know, that sort of zero to one enterprise, SMB type sale and any advice that you have for others. So for us, it was heavily leveraging our network, initially investors, friends, you know, previous companies that we worked with and contacting, you know, CTOs, we sell to the CTOs, so contacting the CTOs partially because you want to get feedback on your product and actually like iterate on it very quickly and that's actually useful. But also partially that, I think, Dio and I very, very rapidly, we did two things. One is we sold the product like immediately. Like we didn't actually give it for free. And I think even if you structure it, I actually gave this tip to someone else. We came up with, like, we didn't come up with it. Well, at least we structured it as like design partnerships where we say, this is what it's going to look like once the product is there. And do you kind of agree to go with us on the three-month journey where we're going to be building it and, you know, do you agree that this is how mature they'll be paying afterwards? It kind of balances out the risk on both sides quite nicely in my opinion, where you give like something for free for a short period. But, you know, there's something at the end and you've pre-agreed the commercials and you've got a contract signed. I think that goes a lot further than a lesser of intent. That initial phase was a lot like network and kind of called out, re-tronously called calling else. I think it's really good training for you even if you're not a salesperson to learn to sell your product. And I'm the first to admit that my background is not from sales and product, customer success, etc. I had to learn how to sell the product. I had to learn how to structure a sales motion. And until I really figured it out and I sort of like, you know, got advice from people and everything, that's only at that point that sales really started taking off and we managed to break outside of our network and see much faster growth on the sales process. And I think the balancing act that you're doing in addition to doing all this is that you don't want to find the wrong customers. And this is a really weird thing to say, but you don't want revenue at all costs. You want the right type of revenue that's going to drive your company forward. And we did get some customers at the beginning that ultimately took the product in the wrong direction. It's super hard to know this ahead of time, but you have to be kind of constantly reassess, am I selling to the right people? If not, you sort of, you cut it. You literally say, sorry, we've closed, we've shut down this product. This is, we no longer sell this. We're focusing on this segment now. We're focusing on this product, we're focusing on this approach. And I would say like, you're balancing these two things at the same time, like really fat, you're trying to sell as much as possible, but at the same time, to the right people, so it's quantity and quality. That was like the first 18 months of stack one. It's the same as in hiring, right? It's, you know, it's higher fast, far, far, self-fast, get rid of them, far, stifling. Exactly. Yeah. But it's very, you have really more bit of a blin to nurture. The other thing I think's quite interesting here is, you know, I think when people think of founder-led sales or sales in general, they think of like sales in films where it's sort of like burning up phones and like it's really kind of like intense and hustling and maybe a bit dirty as well. Whereas I think it would be really helpful if you could just touch on a little bit of things that the tactics that actually work. And I even annoyed myself with using that word tactics because it's just kind of like human relationships that really are sales. It's not some like mythical beast necessarily. You know, some companies do have really like crazy sales organizations, but generally it's about reaching out to the right customers, talking to them like a human, educating them on what this product can do for them and building relationships and trust towards a commercial model that works makes sense for both parties. So yeah, can you just share a little bit of insight into like the channels that you use and the types of conversations you have, how many meetings it takes to close a deal. Some of those like more tangible things that yeah, hopefully demystify it for some founders that think they're going to have to sort of yeah use agents or something like that. Yeah, I definitely don't think you need to initially like I think quantities the enemy of quality are the very beginning like I said, I would say like ultimately it comes down to two things like the more the more I do this, the more I'm sort of coming down to a very simple framework in my mind of like it's all about the packaging and the process. Like cells is ultimately you want to keep it as simple as possible for two reasons. One, because you want to do it quickly, and two, because you want to scale it. So you have to keep it simple. And so the packaging is ultimately like, "Founder-led cells is all about you're making up the product on the spot." That's basically what Founder-led cells is. You're seeing a problem, you're basically saying, "Oh yeah, I could do that." You know, and you've, you're the Founder. So you're like, "Yeah, I'll build it." You know, and so that's that's the easy cell as a Founder. But you can't expect an AE to do this for you because they don't have that knowledge. They don't have the visibility. And so I think it's all about the packaging. It's figuring out what is the target, what's your ICP, why are they your ICP, why do they need your product, why would they change from what they're doing right now, why would they do it now, and kind of you're selling against the status quo of them not doing anything, and your packaging is solution to that problem. And as like, it's the right time, it's the right, the right thing that you should invest in. And the second thing is the process for me, it's, you know, I'm really focused, the something I'm focusing on right now is, how do you streamline that decision-making process for your client? Because at the end of the day, they're making a decision, they're making a big investment, they're potentially putting their reputation, potentially their promotion on the line for buying your product. How can you understand what their concerns are and help them to put together a very strong proposal to their leadership? Because I'm more talking about the champion in this case. That, I would say, like, if you focus on these two aspects having very clear packaging of the value proposition, who you're selling that to, and you're making it easy for them to buy it in theory, you know, you're going to scale your sales process and then decrease your sales costs. When it comes to meetings and all that stuff, I don't, I mean, I don't think there's any hard and fast rule, at least not in our case. But what I would say is you want to watch red flags of like time-waisters, you know, you want to disqualify very early if they're not committed, if the problem's not there, it's much easier. I always say it's much easier to push an open door than to try and crack open a closed one because if the problem's not there, like move on, find a different ICP, that's not the segment you should be focusing on. It's not that it should be easy to sell, but it should definitely not be going against the grain. You're trying to find somewhere where there is a problem, there's an appetite for that solution, and you want to make it super easy to purchase your package product. So I think discovery, learning how to do really good discoveries is important. If ChatGPT had been as good as it is right now, two years ago when I found the company, it would have reduced my time to learn this by six months easily because I could have asked these questions. But like, really run through super thorough discovery process and then the sales that enables them at fastest sales process afterwards, that's my main advice for people who are doing this for the first time. I also think James, going back to your question, it's still the dirty work is still what actually people need to do at the beginning, especially to try to sell a large contract. I remember when we started with a server, we want to build a software we can sell for a million bucks. This is the bar we always had and the type of customers we always wanted as well. And you need to talk to people to do that. You're not going to do that with an AISD out. That's not going to happen. Because you also need to talk to them as well to build the best product anyways. So if you're going to talk to them to know what they want to pay a million dollars for, talk to them during your sales process as well. Go to the events. Do the work that yes, you think by just posting on Twitter, you might get all your customers forever. But no, do the work that a lot of people don't want to do anymore and a lot of people don't like doing anymore. Do the webinars then travel and talk to go visit the customers once you also sign them. Like do actually the dirty work. And I'm saying that as a person that's you know went to software engineering not to talk to people. But it's the reality of like as a founder but everyone in the business that sort of why or software engineers and social engineers talk to customers and talk to go to events. But do the dirty work like there is no shortcut and it's also the best way to learn to build to build a good product. It's great advice generally. I mean for anyone not not just in software. I mean I was actually just talking over the desks with Adam my partner episode one. And who got his job at episode one through a cold email is now equal GP with the rest of us. And yeah, I was saying how one of the hardest things to motivate myself for is doing a bunch of bulk sort of cold outreach. It is a little bit sold destroying but we do so much of it. And we were looking at this success that we've had from it. And we'll probably raise half of our next fund from investors who we've reached out to cold. But we have so many names that we reached out to cold. It is such valuable work. And not only that it's not only the first cold outreach. A lot of the best leads have come after like a fourth follow up without reply. That is just that great just staying in the game and good things will come. I think the point about like the fourth outreach is super important. And one one thing that I've learned actually learned it a while ago. But when you're doing cold calling, this is another thing. Like most people think you're cold calling someone who's never heard of you or like never seen you before. There's actually so many other ways that you can do cold calling where the ice has already been broken that significantly increases the response rate and the positive response rate. Like you can send them an email beforehand. Look at the number of events before you call call someone. Invite people to an event like you're going to an event. You want to meet somewhere. You send them an email and you call them afterwards. You're like, "Hey, I just sent you an email to invite you to this thing. I wanted to make sure you saw it this way. It could be relevant for you. No problem. If not, you're not sending them anything. You're actually giving them something. And by reciprocity, they'll want to potentially talk to you. It's like there's so many other ways to sort of avoid the rough feedback of cold calling. Depending on your industry as well and we're looking in that ways, we can actually sell two products we use or products we've used before. And either we use them and that means we have access to different people's then. We can give feedback that we actually be received and some of our customers we've got in that way. We are users of them and then we feedback that, "Hey, your integration's kind of sucks or whatever it may be, right?" And usually it is way better received because you still have that given take here. You give feedback about their product and you're obviously a user of it. And they're willing to take the call that otherwise they might not be willing to take. And any tips on helping your customer champion to sell and communicate internally because I think that's such a critical part of it as well. I think it's important for you to learn quickly whether your champion is an experienced buyer or not. If they're an experienced buyer, they will be good at driving this because they'll know their process internally. They'll know which stakeholders will be involved in what they care about. You can test that by asking, who's actually involved in making the final decision? Who should we be talking to together? Are we in partnership in selling this internally now? What do they care about? Do you think they're going to receive this well? What are their concerns going to be? Testing your champion is important to be able for you to then fill the gaps where you don't think they're as strong. For example, do they have a good sense of how that business case is going to look in front of the CFO? This is going to happen three weeks from now once you've invested so much time in the POC. If you realize now that they're not good at presenting to this CFO, you should probably build that business case with them. I don't think there's any extended process, but you want to check the boxes and make sure that they know what they're doing. And so now as well as the science, I think the more you do it, at least for me, the more you do it, the more you sort of know, I think there's going to be an issue here. I think they're not going to be able to picture us against our competitors on our value prop very well to the CTO, for example. It's a bit like raising money where you want to save the time of your champion at the thumb rating the memo, right? You want to imagine what they would write in the memo. And it's kind of the same year that what would that buyer actually, how they would want to sell it internally? And sometimes they don't know so it's better for you to do the work for them, so much when you're raising money. This has been packed with so much advice. We are coming to time. So James, you'll probably want to crack on with the other questions. But I just wanted to ask, is there anything that you want to shout out to our audience before we wrap this up? Awesome. So yeah, as you know, we like to end our shows with a couple of little questions that just get us to understand you and how you think and your interest stuff a little bit better. The first one is still kind of work related, but it's yeah, if you've come across any interesting companies that you think could be unicorns in the future. So future unicorn prediction, I'll come to you first, Roma. Okay. I think like the way I think sort of think about this question is I think the application layer of GNI is obviously showing the fastest signs of growth that you're faster than we've ever seen, especially in spaces like coding and I think law now recently. So I was actually thinking of law hive, which obviously you guys know very well. The reason I was thinking about it is not just because of the GNI application layer, but because there's a really fundamental thing that I think about the space. I think that the best companies in this space are the ones that could still win if the the foundational models, making really, really good. And that you win that by having really good distribution and having really good embedding within the work, within the work throws of your customers. If you nail this, you're going to win I think the space. So that's why I'm pretty bullish on our law hive world. Okay. Yeah, I got two answers to this. I'm kind of going to cheat a bit. And I like looking at products we use. That's the one and we've liked, especially if they're disrupting the voice established industries. I think one such product is atio. I think the CRM is a huge industry. I don't know but it really likes us. And HubSpot I think because we actually transition from HubSpot to atio is I don't think a great replacement for Salesforce. Certainly not a big step change. And I think atio is flexible enough but also great at execution, great at marketing, I really highly respect the team there that I think they could be a unicorn. I think they're probably on series stage at the moment. There is another one and they've demoed at demo days and I actually want them to be a unicorn. I don't know if they can or they will be. But I find the idea so cool is artificial societies or societies that are where they actually use like LLMs to simulate a bit like doing SimCity with LLMs for product research or for Azure social marketing going to work etc. Like simulating the individual and how they're going to engage with your content. And I think their broader ideas are on policy and governance and I find that statuaculius case for LLMs that I will become a unicorn. Yeah, 100%. It's a very interesting product. And we are trying to get Nick shot from atio on the podcast if anyone listening can nudge him. That would be great. Awesome. Great answers. Thank you so much for sharing those. And then our final question is our dinner party guest game. So if you could have dinner with any three people who would they be I'll come to you again, Bruma. Okay. So my my three people would be the first one would be Hans Zimmer and that's because I feel like I wasn't there was a year a long time ago where I was in the top 1% of listeners on Spotify. But just generally I've always composed film music since I was a teenager. So I was really enjoyed it. Super inspirational person. Second one would be Gordon Ramsay because I love cooking. I this some like a passion I've discovered over the years I didn't and I've not always been that way. But I just feel like he would be a hilarious cast. I don't know what in general. Because you would be so judgmental of the of the food. And the last one, this is going to this probably going to sound pretentious. But I do generally this one one thing I've one person I've been looking into more and more is like you know that I've been feeling the sun. So I'm saying, you know, I'm hearing myself. So I apologize. But I do I am like super interested in like how he was absolutely a genius at so many different things. And like you don't really find that as much these days. People are like super deep into one thing. That's and I you know when I was young I went to visit where he lived in France and like that always made a big impression on me. It's just he was a fantastic artist, but also like an incredible mathematician and the physicist inside. So yeah, that's probably the three people if I could didn't know with them. Yeah. Romas going to be angry at me, but I'm actually going to see and see. Oh, no, I'm glad I want to. But yeah, the three for me, I think and one is probably to save me from I guess having to travel in the US anytime soon. I guess it's a bit of a risk, but let's say is Barack Obama actually, overall, I think it's one of the greatest public speaker of whole generation. And I can like whenever you listen to one of his old speech, you're like, man, that man can speak. And I always felt like I had a lot of progress to make in public speaking and is a eyes bar, but also like he's seen so much stuff and you know, under the hood. And what happens on the stake level that I'm sure that big, great topic to discuss to enter dinner party. And also, it sounds like that be enough, it's have enough drugs to go around as well. Another one which is more or 80 to I guess what we're doing, which would be Patrick Corison from Strive. I think what's tripe as built out of redefining industry, but also how it's still the gold standard for like B2B brand branding. And for SDKs and documentation and like developer experience, I think obviously we're a developer product as well. Today and we work with APIs and that's kind of like the striper's often been the gold standard that we look for in terms of experience and redefining an industry. And finally, and I think that could be a bit controversial, but Brian Johnson, the guy that's called brain tree that's doing is a forgot what he's doing now, but like longevity, you know, maxing, which I found at first like super ridiculous, but I'm really getting into it for some reason. Yeah. And I got a huge amount of respect of like the data collection that goes behind it, like you we think during our work, like data like decision, etc. But like the idea of as an individual, you can try to do that with your body. It's kind of awesome. And I'm fully in the end very, very many years. And otherwise, but either way, it's great to see. Yeah, awesome. Great answers. Gordon Ramsay has been mentioned once before. But yeah, it's not omnipresent. You know, I'm doing Jack and Jill that also picked him. But the rest of the guests, I think most of them have been mentioned, but Brian Johnson is a unique answer. And yeah, I think he's he's gone, I think quite often, people who like break through into the conscious have to be like mad to break through. And then over time, you sort of realize, maybe they're not so mad. It's like quite how it happens. It's kind of interesting. And I think he's going through that that process of being not considered as mad at the moment, which is kind of interesting. But yeah, awesome answers. Thank you. It's really good to get a bit of insight. And look, we are massive fans of you guys and the business. Huge congratulations on your on your fundraise. It's great news. And it's just the start really. I'm sure you feel like that is like the start of the next chapter. And it's hopefully going to be a very exciting one. So thank you so much for both coming on and sharing your writing unicorn story. I'm sure you will be a unicorn. So that's very exciting. And yeah, it was a great episode, lots of insight into finding your co-founder, working on stuff that matters, selling your product and lots of other bits. So thanks again. That was really fun. Thank you so much. That's it for this week. Thanks very much for listening to stay up to date with the latest episodes. Please follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. We also have a newsletter called Reading Unicorns, which is another great way to get every episode direct to your inbox. Please tell your friends about it and engage with us on social media. And we'll see you on the next episode.